Probably, as Leslie Stephen has pointed out, his theorizing is the result of a cloudy sense of the bearing of the Deist controversy.

If God is to be banished from direct connection with earthly affairs, we must seek a human explanation of political facts.

And he became convinced that this attitude applies not less completely to ecclesiastical than to secular politics.

Of his opponents, by far the ablest was William Law, the only theologian whom Gibbon may be said to have respected, and the parent, through his mystical writings, of the Wesleyan movement.

Snape, then Provost of Eton, was always incisive; and his pamphlet went through seventeen editions in a single year and provoked seven replies within three months.